In a networked society where value systems are becoming ever more diversified, it is difficult to express a value of information flowing over a network in a uniform manner. For example, in a case of photographs of your own children, a value of the photographs changes in a case of showing the photographs to friends and in a case of showing the photographs to the children's grandparents. The value therefore changes according to a context (with whom the information is being communicated) even for the same information.
In the high-speed network society, it is considered that individual users or a community accumulates this kind of information and values.
Technology capable of expressing this kind of accumulated information and values as a user community profile, and handling changes in the profile due to the advancement of communication activities becomes extremely important.
By handling these kinds of profiles, it is possible for the user to understand their own experiences in accordance with relationship with targets over a network.
Further, understanding of information by analyzing based on past relationships while searching new information is straightforward. Further, appropriate information distribution based on the experience of a user himself/herself is also possible without publishing individual information of the user. A company may also understand relationships between users over a network and understand a value of its own products in the community.
In related arts, technology paying attention to relationships with targets of communication is disclosed in Japanese Laid-open Patent Application Publication No. Hei. 11-296461 “System and Method for Exchanging Information Between Users, User Terminal, Server Calculator, and Recording Medium Recorded With Inter-user Information Exchange Program”.
In this invention, support of communication activities is carried out by describing user characteristics using multi-dimensional vectors, calculating relevance between users from the multi-dimensional vectors and expressing these on a terminal, and presenting the relationship that the users have.
This invention handles similarity of preferences but does not take into consideration what kind of value is provided due to communication with a subject of a certain relationship. Because of this, with the previous example of a photograph, friends and relatives are handled as targets having the same similarity of preferences.
In addition to user preferences, technology taking into consideration influence is provided in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2001-34625, “Document Information Providing Method, Document Information Providing Device, and Storage Medium Recorded With Document Information Providing Program”.
This invention is capable of giving a high value according to the topic of information recommended by users who tend to recommend information of a certain value by expressing the dependency in user profiles that people make recommendations to other people for items that they themselves like.
Further, technology taking into consideration relationships between users is described in “Information-Spread Model based on Users Relevance” (12th Data Engineering Workshop (DEWS2001) and “the Distributed Information Collection System By Word-Of-Mouth” (10th Workshop on Multi-agent and Cooperative Computation).
In this technology, information is filtered and information of value is propagated by individual users being in possession of reliability with respect to neighboring users for between neighboring users on a network, with information distribution then being carried out based on this reliability. The inventions and technologies described above express relationships as profiles in order to promote flowing of only information having a value.
Further, an invention expressing user preferences in order to enable recommendations according to context for a user is provided in Japanese Patent Application Publication 2001-155038 “User Preference Information Structure having a Poly-hierarchal Structure and Multimedia Information Providing Method Utilizing this Structure”. This invention enables the expression of a degree of preference for information at home and a degree of preference for information at an office etc. using technology for user profiles having a hierarchical structure.
This invention enables the expression of user profiles for each device by cutting out part of a hierarchical structure etc. For example, it is possible to carry out a description of “when a user is viewing a movie using a television in a living room, a movie that can be watched by the family together is preferred, but when the user is watching a movie using a television in his/her own room, there are cases where a more adult-oriented movie may be preferred”. This may be referred to as a profile expressing the relationship between devices and users.
However, these inventions and technologies to not take into consideration the expression of what kind of value is collected together at targets centered on in sets for relationships. Namely, communications occurring at certain relationships mutually influence each other and it is not possible to handle changes in value possessed by information occurring as a result.
The object of the present invention is to provide an information processing device etc. capable of dynamically handling changes occurring in value of information.